City of Philadelphia - File #: 130363

• File #: 130363
• Version: 0
• Type: Resolution
• Status: ADOPTED
• File created: 5/2/2013
• In control: Committee on Public Safety
• Title: Authorizing Council's Committee on Public Safety to investigate and hold public hearings reviewing the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole and its practices in Philadelphia, including the LSI-R offender risk assessment tool and the effect that it has on the safety of the citizens of Philadelphia.
• Sponsors: Councilmember O'Brien, Councilmember Jones, Councilmember Greenlee, Councilmember Goode, Councilmember Kenney, Councilmember Bass, Councilmember Quiñones Sánchez, Councilmember Blackwell, Councilmember Johnson, Councilmember Oh, Councilmember Henon, Councilmember Squilla, Councilmember Reynolds Brown

Date	Ver.	Action By	Action	Result	Tally
5/2/2013	0	CITY COUNCIL	Introduced and Ordered Placed on This Week's Final Passage Calendar	Pass
5/2/2013	0	CITY COUNCIL	ADOPTED & REFERRED

Title
Authorizing Council's Committee on Public Safety to investigate and hold public hearings reviewing the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole and its practices in Philadelphia, including the LSI-R offender risk assessment tool and the effect that it has on the safety of the citizens of Philadelphia.

Body
WHEREAS, The defined mission of the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole (the Board) is to protect the safety of the public, address the needs of crime victims, improve county adult probation and parole services and assist in the fair administration of justice by ensuring the custody, control, and treatment of offenders under the jurisdiction of the Board; and

WHEREAS, The Board has the legal responsibility to parole, recommit for violations of parole, and discharge from parole offenders sentenced to two years or more; and

WHEREAS, Once an inmate becomes eligible for parole, the decision to release that inmate is guided by an assessment of the inmate's risk to public safety; and

WHEREAS, The benefits of an effective risk/need assessment and classification are numerous and they include making better decisions during sentencing, post-sentencing programming and supervision; and

WHEREAS, Assessments can provide highly accurate predictions of how individuals with similar characteristics might behave in the future. These assessments are predicated on the assumption that individual criminal behavior can be predicted by assigning offenders to groups that have explicit re-offending probabilities; and

WHEREAS, The Board selected the Level of Service Inventory-Revised (LSI-R) instrument as its risk classification. The LSI-R was developed in the late 1970s in Canada through a collaboration of probation officers, correctional managers, practitioners and researchers; and

WHEREAS, LSI-R is a risk/need assessment tool which identifies problem areas in an offender's life and predicts his/her risk of recidivism. It is co...